My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

photo courtesy Jason at jasonlandry.com

Jason Landry writes:

I am in the home stretch of my MFA program…4 more months left. I have begun my thesis on The Photo Collector / The Photo Collection. This won’t be the title of the thesis, but mainly what it will be about. I am writing to you because I want your take on people who collect. Do you think there is a unifying thread that connects all collectors?

Please think this one through, and feel free to analyze it from all angles. I consider you a collector of things, ephemera, bees, plants, etc….and know there is some reason you do this,…it is the same reason that I collected baseball cards and now collect photo books and fine art photography.

Me:

I’d be happy to help. Off the top of my head, collectors get a rush from finding things. It feels like a successful hunt when you come home with an object you like. I think it has something to do with a program in our brain telling us to store things for time of need. I think most collectors don’t see the stuff they have, they only have eyes for what they don’t. So it is never satisfied, the desire to hunt. Which evolutionarily speaking, is good. If you get one tomato and think your work is done for the day, you won’t survive.

In the modern age of supermarkets we don’t have anything foodwise to collect. No firewood gathering, no aberrying’ we go. We go thrift shopping. Or bargain hunting. Antiquing. Because we look for things that sell below their value. A junk man/collector does not pay full price. He will go without rather than pay what the asking price is. I went to an estate sale today and like always, I walked out with something from the free pile in the garage – an old can of charcoal lighting fluid. I collect the old metal cans of the stuff. Why? Because they are old and often free and I believe someday I will have a valuable collection.

Instead of gathering nuts, we collectors gather items we believe contain value. So we convert from nuts to money. Money we can cash in when we retire, or want to go on vacation. The old coin collection, the mint condition baseball rookie cards, they are our nuts. People that don’t like to collect think we are nuts. They don’t see value, they see clutter.